Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 157

Welcome to the 157th issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly!

The following Linux-based operating systems have been announced last week: Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7. In other news: Canonical announced the schedule for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Developer Summit event for 2011, which will take place in Orlando, Florida, USA; Canonical published the release schedule for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system; Oracle proudly announced the release of VirtualBox 4.1.0, which brings lots of new features and many improvements; Linus Torvalds proudly announced the final and stable version of the highly anticipated Linux kernel 3.0, which brings support for Microsoft Kinect, Btrfs data scrubbing and automatic defragmentation, XEN Dom0 support, Wake on WLAN and much more. The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the new and updated Linux distributions, and the development releases.

On July 21st, Canonical proudly announced the third maintenance release of the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system, which incorporates numerous security fixes and updates. The Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS release brings to its dedicated users a lot of security updates and corrections, all with a single goal: to keep Ubuntu 10.04 LTS a stable and reliable Linux distribution!

Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS fixes some installation bugs, various upgrade issues, improves support for many hardware components, and fixes annoying desktop bugs. Ubuntu 10.04.3 (Lucid Lynx) is a Long Term Support (LTS) distribution, supported with maintenance updates and security fixes until April 2013 on desktops, and April 2015 on servers.

Also on July 21st, Red Hat announced the final release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 operating system. After a couple of months in beta, it is available for all Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 subscribers. As with all minor updates, the focus is on bug fixes and stability, but there are several new features as well.

Improvements to Xen virtualization should be noted since Red Hat has deprecated the Xen hypervisor in favor of the newer KVM, in RHEL 6. One of the more important additions is support for SCAP, which stands for Security Content Automation Protocol, implemented via OpenSCAP. The technology was first introduced in Fedora 14 and has now made it into Red Hat's 5.x branch.

· On July 18th, Canonical proudly announced the Ubuntu Developer Summit event for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release, where the entire Canonical development team and members of the Ubuntu community gather together to share knowledge, discuss and design the next version of the Ubuntu operating system. The Ubuntu 12.04 Developer Summit event will take place in Orlando, Florida, USA from 31st October to 4th November. Read more about it here.

· On July 19th, the release schedule for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system has been published on the Ubuntu wiki. The distribution will be released at the end of April 2012. Even if the codename for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has not been chosen yet, we already have the release schedule on our hands. Ubuntu 12.04 will be an LTS (Long Term Support) release, therefore we expect a strong, powerful and very stable operating system. Read more about it here.

· On July 19th, Oracle proudly announced a major update to its popular and powerful VirtualBox virtualization software, VirtualBox 4.1.0, which brings lots of new features and many improvements. Being a major update, existing VirtualBox installations should be removed from the system before installing the new VirtualBox 4.1.0 version. Read more about it here.

· On July 21st, Linus Torvalds proudly announced today the immediate availability for download of the highly anticipated Linux kernel 3.0. Among the new features included in Linux kernel 3.0 we can mention Btrfs data scrubbing and automatic defragmentation, Berkeley Packet Filter JIT filtering, unprivileged ICMP_ECHO, XEN Dom0 support, wake on WLAN, lots of new drivers and support for many hardware components. Read more about it here.

Video Clip of the Week: Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS Review

· For this week we've posted an 720p HD video clip that overviews the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system. The video has 6 minutes and 35 seconds, and it was posted by dckirba. Enjoy!